Author: Gabriella Garcia

So again back to when I thought I really wanted to be a teacher. I was looking up ways to really get kinds interested in poets they had never heard of before or introduce them to kinds of poetry they had never thought of before. So I found this graphic novel version of Howl by Allen Ginsberg.  I never ended up buying it but I think I would still like to. You can see a mini preview of it on Amazon.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Howl-Graphic-Novel-Allen-Ginsberg/dp/0062015176

I looked through some of the pages that you can preview and I was thoroughly impressed. I think that the images were striking but also helped guide the reader into the focused solitude that is required to read a poem. I think maybe graphic novels are a wonderful way to make texts like Howl more, and I’m sorry, accessible to kids who have never read or were never planning to read a text like this. I know that my English book in high school had complimentary art that was themed similarly to the texts and that really helped some kids to get into the mindset, mood, and tone of the poem. Do you think that this could be a way to do that? I think that texts considered as complicated as Howl could maybe be digested more easily by a high school student. There are definitely themes and lessons that can be learned from it and maybe excerpts of the text can be part of a curriculum.

You  might have seen this before but here is a blog that uses google searches to make found poems. I think some of these aren’t organic however I don’t think that’s the point. It’s interesting to think about a poem that uses common searches as humorous and also as a point of solidarity. Some of these are extremely sad and some are are pretty poignant.

http://www.googlepoetics.com/

 

I tried a few myself and my favorite was this one:

yesterday I

yesterday i saw a lion kiss a deer

yesterday instrumental

yesterday in spanish

yesterday is gone

Try some and see what you come up with! post your fave!

 

So I was trying to find some cool poetry stuff to write about and I happened upon this great collection of audio recordings in the Woodberry Poetry Room. Go to the link and you’ll find a list of many recognizable names reading their work and sometimes just speaking with someone. After watching the documentary “Listen to Me, Marlon,” a wonderful documentary about Marlon Brando that uses recorded tapes that he recorded as a coping mechanism for his personal trials and interviews, I’ve been a little obsessed with audio recordings of famous artists. The director then used these tapes as a way to get through his life and used mostly images of him and clips of him behind scenes of movies and being interviewed. I feel extremely attached to this way of experiencing an artist because the experience of hearing the artist in your ears is such a unique one. Often times these recordings have subtle place markers like echoes, audience reactions, laughing, and sometimes the artist will pause or get caught up in what they’re saying. We spoke about how reading a poem aloud can create a different poem so this collection is even more interesting because most of them take place in the same room. A lot of these poetry readings have Q&As and the writers often relate how they came to write their poems. I think this is wonderful because it really draws out that our favorite poets are usually our favorite thinkers and philosophers.

I also think that as these recordings are all taking place in the same room this creates a virtual experience of time and place. For the imaginative writer this can be really evocative experience. It is intimate because unlike a reading you do not get dressed up to listen to an audio recording of Charles Olsen or Ezra Pound. You sit in your pajamas and the experience is recreated for the personal you. There are also photos of the room so it really brings it alive, at least it did for me.

Go! Listen to some poets in this space!

http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/listeningbooth/

 

P.S. I realize there are not that many women are POC in this list, but that wasn’t new news.

If we’re talking about the stanza as a room, this version of the stanza is a maze. So the way it works is that the stanza is the same across as it is down kind of like a sudoku. I got a really looming feeling from this because words are repeated diagonally from each other so it feels like an echo while you’re reading. I think conjures the feeling of not being able to escape or having to re-navigate. I also think that as a curiosity you want to read the stanza twice to make sure it really is repeating itself again so the second read is more of a second take or a sort of deja vu. This one is by Lewis Carol.

I think that Lewis Carol’s poem here is a good fit because he seems perpetually bothered by the she, which is highlighted by the use of “often.” I think other kind of poems that would be great for this form would be about themes that need revisiting and imitate restlessness. I think personally I would use this form to write about moments in social situations when I realize that the situation has been affected by gender norms.

I                  am                here,

am               I                   lonely

here,          lonely            now?

 

It also really makes for a fragmented feeling as it’s difficult to find a sentence that fits perfectly both ways.

I challenge you guys to try a short one too!

So I thought I would share this website that generates all kinds of rhymes and takes alliteration into consideration. I don’t usually use rhyme however I really like this website because it considers syllables, alliteration, half-rhyme, and sometimes some pretty good themes? So just in case you were considering using more rhymes in your revisions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good luck with finals!

 

www.b-rhymes.com/rhyme/

I was paging through a variety of literary journals and magazines today just looking for something good to read or submit to and I realized that it was just fun reading the concepts or themes of the journals and magazines. One called 3Elements gives three words as prompts and the submissions need use those words in some way. This is really interesting to me because I always think of journals and magazines as places to put your just happened to be done work. This one is super generative, as are many many more I’m finding. So that made me think about how I would want to frame a journal and or magazine.

If I was making a journal inspired by this semester in poetry I think I would call it ‘Formal Wear’ however all the prompts or themes would be about challenging form. I think I would accept essays about form or challenging form (hopefully some that completely contradict each other), and then maybe only poems that were either breaking form or making new forms. Maybe the writer would need to submit a little description of the form as they see it and why they chose to break it? I don’t know but paging through the different themes really made me think about what writers want to read and why that’s important. I think as writers we want to justify and validate why we take risks and have our own style by reading other people. We also learn every time we read whether it be about an emotion we didn’t know we felt or a style choice we would have never tried. I think again this makes me feel that art is an ongoing collaborative work that no one can claim on their own and that doesn’t take away from authenticity.

If you were asked to generate an idea for a journal or magazine tomorrow what would your theme be? Why would you want that theme? What would other writers get from your journal?

I tried black out poetry, which I had never tried before! Besides getting maybe a little high from the Sharpee fumes, it was fun and challenging. I had to really find a page that would need to be a black out poem and therefore themes that would have to do with space in this way. So I found this book called Future Shock, totally free, and paged through. I did find one that had the word horizon in all caps and decided to use the horizon as an image that uses light and receding light. I only realized this after I saw the words “nearby city” and then decided to think about a scene with both a horizon and a city and how the two exchange light in a way as night falls. Here is my poem! If you don’t get any of these themes from it I don’t blame you. I do recommend trying the black out poem though! I tried another one but the image wouldn’t load correctly.

 

 

So recently I decided to drop my idea of becoming a teacher, for now, and focus on writing. But I wanted to talk bout how when I took my first teaching class we had to write a lesson plan and NO ONE wanted to teach poetry. I feel like oftentimes when I hear teachers or future educators talking about teaching poetry it’s with a little bit of fear and, or agitation. So I’ve thought a lot about how to teach someone to write poetry who has never written it before. I did end up writing a lesson plan introducing poetry and it began with a slam poetry video. Then I had printouts of a Tupac song and an Emily Dickinson song that both used rose imagery to point out how differently the language was and how many ways you can use any one image. My favorite part though was I was going to have the kids pick from a list of emotions, have them write an anecdote that made them feel that way in a journal, then circle all the “important words” and then copy those down onto another piece of paper. I would give them a moment to rearrange if they liked and add words they felt were necessary. So I’ve really liked this approach since. I feel like this would be a good way to introduce writing poetry to anyone who has never written poetry before. Of course this wouldn’t generate the best poetry, however it would be a good way to think about how language isolated can work without attaching it to an essay form.

Were there specific lesson that were really helpful when any of you started writing poetry? I think I mainly learned from reading poetry and learning to close-read.

In Gerry LaFemina’s article in the Writer’s Chronicle he writes about how writers of lyric poetry can use fragmentation to portray a feeling, often of grief. Lyric poetry he says is “noted for its brevity, its intensity ,its focus solely on a moment” and of course it is narrative. Toward the end of his article he speaks about poems that are focused on the experience and or feeling over the narrative details. He uses examples such as a Charles Wright poem, adding that Wright often “will establish narrative context in the title alone, and then let landscape and meditation do the work.” He then backs himself up with more poets who also use landscape and other actions and mediations to do the work of the poem.

Since we’ve been so focused on context this semester I was wondering how you all felt about this? I personally feel that there are poems that are exploring a feeling and that by demanding certain setting and or narrative details the reader may be focusing on not the wrong things, but could be refusing to see how the poem is doing a lot of the work already. LaFemina uses this poem by Christine Garren, “February Snow,” as an example because it uses winter snow falling, the ringing of a cell phone, and birds sleeping to drive its mood and narrative.

 

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The roofs were snow covered, the powders blown across

the tree-limbs’ cross hatch.

In the parking lot below a person’s cell phone rings, clearly

like the bells of a church.

Sometimes it is beautiful, in some of the minutes

then ordinary again—

white dust on the tree-limbs and power lines—and on the attics.

The birds sleep.

In every room I walk the snow falls beyond the black glass—

isn’t that how it was in the beginning, throughout the rooms,

that feeling

of air in the midst of burial.

---

I feel that sometimes we forget that the pure emotion behind words can help drive a story and that being engaged in a poem can replace some, not all, context details. Obviously there are extremely nuanced things going on in this poem, mimicking the ideas of grief and the feeling of it. I feel that LaFemina ends his article on an excellent note with this quote by Jack Hitt;  “to every [poem] we bring unconscious scripts; as any given sentence [or line] unspools, we readjust the schema to make better sense of what we are hearing [or reading].” Thoughts?

So here I am struggling for the thousandth time to write a blog post. I often start a post and then crumble under a frustrating feeling that I have no right to say anything about poetry, or should I say Poetry? I feel this way for a number of reasons including a riddling amount of anxiety that I’m just wrong. So in response I’m wondering how you all feel about being a writer and your credentials? A common theme in a few conversations and presentations I’ve heard lately is “the amateur” versus the formally educated. Do any of you feel that either is more valid and if so why? Also do any of you feel like there’s a pressure to be extensively educated before you can have an opinion worth stating in a group of writers? Do any of you feel there are biases against you in a writing community? I’m just curious and anyone who wants to share an experience or a feeling please do!

I think there is pressure on any group of specific study to be extremely educated before their opinions count or their work can be esteemed. In an article I read a while ago, sorry I can’t find the link, a successful graphic novelist urged that he felt extremely frustrated by this attitude that an artist needs to have a degree or be extremely well versed in the history of their art to start working. He felt that there should be a push for all artists to just start working as soon as they feel they want to be an artist. He got a lot of push back because other graphic artists felt that “we don’t need more bad art.” However I think he had a point. By saying there are certain credentials for being an artist, we’re taking away from what art is, don’t you think? I mean there’s always room for improvement and there are certain mechanics and techniques that improve the art, but art is an expression of oneself. Shouldn’t art just be a chill collaborative movement to share how we feel about being alive?